COLUMN - Journalism of the future should be less concerned with the present

(John Lloyd is a Reuters columnist but his opinions are his
own.)

By John Lloyd

Jan 22 (Reuters) - A constant and frequent complaint about
journalism is that it concentrates almost exclusively on what is
happening now, and not the future. Why didn't journalists see
the financial crash coming? Why didn't they know there were no
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Why didn't they warn about
Enron's house of cards? Why didn't they do more, in advance, on
the climate changes that helped cause Hurricane Sandy in the
United States last October? Journalists sometimes join in on
this to beat themselves up - especially on the Iraqi WMD issue -
because they feel foolish about giving credence to claims that
turned out to be wrong, or about not asking the right questions.

Besides, the trend in a lot of the media is toward more
scandal, more controversy and more opining. There are
publications and broadcasts and news agencies (such as this one)
that are wedded to objective reporting, investigation and
rational analysis, but they are in the minority, and a lot of
them are finding it hard to make a living these days.

The Web allows news organizations to make much more
multimedia and source material available to audiences that have
swollen in size (though many visit websites only briefly). But
most new media accentuate the trend of covering the here and
now, since they allow reporting and publication in, or much
closer to, real time.

Of course, that's in large part what the function of news.
But journalists' own assessment of their mission is that it must
hold power to account, inform the citizenry of all issues in the
public interest and adequately cover the significant
institutions and events of society and the world. You can say it
has never adequately done so. Regardless, it has the tools to do
better now.

Fulfilling that "Sunday best" definition of our job means,
more than ever, looking into the future. Not to pronounce on
things we can't know - whether or not there were WMDs in Iraq,
just when the financial crash would come, etc. - but to focus on
the long-term strategic issues that set the context within which
politicians and institutions plan and which will be of enormous
importance to us, and even more, our children. Understanding,
describing and making intelligible these large questions is
holding power to account, is informing the citizenry, is
covering the significant.

Here's a short list of critical issues that journalists
should be working on:

 Ecological dangers, especially global warming.

 Demographic issues - where some populations are
shrinking and aging, others are growing fast.

 Weapons of mass destruction - nuclear, chemical,
biological - and the greater danger if they are possessed by
rogue states or groups.

 U.S. global hegemony giving way to multi-polarity and
the uncertainty as to what world system (if any) will succeed
it.

 An emerging global "middle class" and its effect on
economies, resources and ecology.

 Greater individual empowerment, which allows space for
the exercise of greater initiative but also for less inhibited
destructive behavior.

Burgeoning cities, with urbanized populations becoming the
majority.

 Growing difficulties that governments at every level
experience in providing authoritative leadership, especially in
those areas where governments are not trusted.

 Accelerating speed of change and the problems
administrations and institutions experience in adapting to it.

 Areas of great instability, within and between states,
especially in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and the former
Soviet Union.

 The breakdown or degradation of health, education and
social welfare systems.

 The breakdown or degradation of financial and banking
systems.

 The increased pressure on rich countries because of
immigrants from poor or war-torn countries and regions.

 A widespread outage of information-technology systems
caused by an attack or other failure.

 The development of increasingly intelligent machines
and of 3D printing, and their effects on employment.

Most of the elements of this incomplete list carry
opportunities as well as risks. It's also possible to construct
a uniformly benign list, in which applied science and greatly
enhanced communication solve or ameliorate problems of food and
water; the discovery of new energy resources and the development
of alternative energy sources cancel or at least delay
shortages; diplomatic breakthroughs reduce the threat of warfare
 and so on. Bill Clinton, ever the sunny optimist, did just
that recently.

Yet the long-term challenges of a rapidly globalizing world
in which many of the pillars of the postwar system are now at
least in question are greater than ever. The most popular media,
though, do little to reflect them or promote knowledge of them.
As you will see if you use the links in each of these categories
and then expand your search, there's a very large amount of
easily accessible material on them. But they tend to be written
by and speak to circles of experts, policymakers and
enthusiasts, and are frequently arcane for most readers.

We should find some way of making this stuff part of a real
global conversation - one that is vivid, comprehensible and more
democratic. Another self-made injunction to journalists is to
make the significant interesting, and there's no dispute that
most of what I've laid out above is significant. But
interesting? That's first of all our job - and we owe it, if not
to ourselves and our trade, to the kids. And then there's
another responsibility that belongs to the public: to read and
watch and understand it.

( John Lloyd co-founded the Reuters Institute for the Study
of Journalism at the University of Oxford, where he is Director
of Journalism. Lloyd has written several books, including "What
the Media Are Doing to Our Politics" (2004). He is also a
contributing editor at FT and the founder of FT Magazine. )